In the United States alone, there are over 200,000 people living with a chronic spinal cord injury (SCI). People with chronic SCI have impaired motor functions that limit their ability to perform activities of daily living, such as grasping and manipulating objects. A recent survey of 681 people with tetraplegia, also known as quadriplegia, demonstrated that for over 45%, regaining arm and hand function would improve their quality of life significantly. Improving impaired motor function can enable increased social participation and greater independence. At the present, physical therapy and biofeedback aim to augment function in residual muscles after chronic SCI. For muscles with complete loss of descending drive, however, these therapies are ineffective. Functional electrical stimulation (FES) systems have had limited success in restoring functionally important grasps for some individuals with tetraplegia. However, while sophisticated FES systems have been developed, one of the main challenges for FES systems is to obtain multiple independent control signals that allow stimulation of muscles in a coordinated fashion in order to generate smooth and natural hand movements.